The performance of aircraft mobile surfaces such as vertical tails, horizontal tail planes, elevators or rudders placed in the rear part of the aircraft is one of the more important issues in global aircraft design. Said surfaces are used as control surfaces, for example a horizontal tail plane is used to control pitch and a rudder is used to control yaw. Therefore its behavior defines aircraft control laws and design constrains.
When designing the elements composing an aircraft, such as the fuselage, wings, stabilizers, etc. it is necessary to know the aerodynamic properties of such components. In view of the large size of aircrafts, aerodynamic tests are made with scaled models that reproduce the whole or at least a part of the aircraft, the scaled models being subjected to tests in a wind tunnel.
Those tests are particularly important for the rear part of the aircraft because it is difficult to obtain comprehensive analytical models of its aerodynamic behaviour since the rear part of the aircraft is affected by other parts of an aircraft and particularly by the aircraft wing. For example they can suffer a loss of upstream dynamic pressure due to effects caused by the wing which is difficult to take into account using classical analytical schemes.
Even though the results currently obtained in wind tunnel tests allow a good understanding of the aerodynamical behaviour of tails and other components of the rear part of the aircraft, they are usually produced at a Reynolds number very much lower than the real aircraft flight Reynolds number and therefore the scaling of the results is sometimes difficult.
The present invention is intended to improve this drawback.